Voice messaging systems have long provided the service of accepting and recording voice messages for subscribers from impromptu callers. In these systems, message origination is not restricted to subscribers of these messaging systems or to subscribers of remote messaging systems that are networked with these systems; rather, any caller can originate a message. As voice messaging and e-mail systems become integrated into multimedia messaging systems, it becomes desirable to extend the call-answer capability of voice messaging systems to text messages and other message-media besides voice, and to make this capability available to substantially any and all possible message originators, without pre-subscription and without preference or deference to the computer operating system of the originator.
One promising opportunity is to use platform-independent TCP/IP (transmission control protocol/Internet protocol) applications or platform-independent Web browsers and the growing community of TCP/IP and Web users to provide the connectivity infrastructure that is needed to deliver new types of electronic media directly into the mailboxes of a multimedia messaging system. The TCP/IP is the standard protocol suite of the Internet. Because of the Internet's popularity, TCP/IP applications have been written and are being distributed for essentially all major computer operating systems. Of specific interest are the FTP (file transfer protocol) protocol which allows the simple transfer of files between computers, Telnet which supports terminal emulation and login to host capabilities, and Chat which is a simple split-screen two-way text interface application that allows two people to type to each other simultaneously. Similarly, Web services on the Internet are being marketed and supported as a non-subscriber-based global information-distribution mechanism. Because of its popularity, Web browser applications have been written and are being distributed for essentially all major computer operating systems. These TCP/IP applications and Web browsers therefore provide a widespread infrastructure for text, binary, and other media message delivery.
Conventional Web integrations with mailboxes focus on retrieval of messages, where the mailbox is owned and the messages are retrieved by the message recipient who typically already has a mailbox user-interface application which has capabilities preferable to those provided by a Web browser. But such integrations do not benefit a message originator who has the ability to send full multimedia messages and who is not a subscriber to the messaging system. Some existing Web browser applications do include the ability to send e-mail. But this is done via the standard e-mail SMTP protocol which inherently has the disadvantages of requiring an affiliation with an SMTP server to fulfill the e-mail delivery request. Such an affiliation is not usually available without pre-subscription. The SMTP protocol also does not assure confirmed delivery into the recipient's mailbox.